Improvement to Trivia, category selection

Trivia is one of the easily accessible games available. A lot of players like to hang around the Plaza, and people often stop by some casual Trivia sessions because they are short and often times hilarious to play with random players.

The problem I found with Trivia is how wide the range of the topics can be which leads to who can guess better and faster. There are some funny interactions that happen because nobody knows the answer, but it often goes against to the whole idea of Trivia games.
No one really considers the game competitive, nor it should be changed that way. This suggestion to add category selection is not to make the game fair, but more fun to play.

For games with friends, it’s really obvious that there should be a category selection.
For games with random players, this suggestion extends for another improvement: category voting.

When the game starts, the players should be able to “vote” on categories they would like to play as many as they want.
The game will then pick most suggested topic. If there is a tie or a topic that everybody chose it could add more. To spicy things a little bit, you could also add “random category” as another possible voting selection.
To make things more intuitive for those who would miss the current version of Trivia, “everything” could also be another option.

This voting system allows friends to cooperatively pick one or a certain number of topics they would like to add, and have a fair game for games with random players.

Even if the minority loses the vote, I don’t believe they would feel like they are forced to play a game they don’t want as Trivia is short and already random. It gives you units for losing anyway.

Seems like a simple yet effective system. The only thing I might change is, instead of pulling questions only from the most voted category, pull questions from all categories voted on. If one category has multiple votes, simply increase the frequency of questions from that category. With a 6 person max and 24 categories to choose from, the chances of not having a tie (without cooperation, mind you) is rather slim. Plus, even if you are the minority vote you still get a chance at your preferred category.

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Category: Music
Difficulty: Easy
What’s the middle name of the Mischievous Carpet’s drummer’s second son?

Yeah, I can get behind this.

Whenever I see “Category - Entertainment: Japanese Anime & Manga”, I accept my fate and just take that 1/4 chance since I don’t know anything about the category at all. It’d be nice to just do questions from one category.

Only problem is see with this is that people are more likely to drop out of a Trivia game if it’s a category they know nothing about. I know i wouldn’t stick around trying to answer questions based solely on Geography, or Anime.
1 or 2 questions are tolerable, a whole quiz on them would just cause people to either leave the game or continue to guess answers.

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Does anybody have a suggestion to how we actually vote? Trivia only has 4 buttons. Maybe we could see an interactive trivia screen with the system Zak is implementing in the arcade?

A pop-up…?

That’s the obvious answer, I’m just trying to see if there’s anybody with a better suggestion (I don’t really like pop-ups).